


the five stages of grief

by dannyboyy



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Five Stages of Grief, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 09:03:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7164686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dannyboyy/pseuds/dannyboyy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim experiences the five stages of grief, seven times each.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the five stages of grief

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for vague depictions of violence, blood, canon-typical stuff. also heavy mentions of depression, character death, and other mental illness allusions. poor timmers. :(

**Denial**

**-**

It’s like something out of a fever dream. Tim can vaguely remember getting sick once as a young child and having delusions due to a high fever. It feels a bit like that; only _those_ dreams had been muddled and hazy.

This reality in front of him was so sharp and clear it was as if he’d replaced his eyes with broken glass.

The hospital bed is white like bone and the walls are blue or grey, like a holding cell, and Tim’s lungs are taunt like a tightrope. Tim wonders if his experience with them had helped Dick at all, if he had experienced this feeling, too.

Tim’s senses don’t dull at all, but his perception of them does, until he’s experiencing every new thing that happens like it’s already a memory. _I’m going into shock,_ he thinks to himself, and automatically a virtual book about shock victims and how to deal with them springs up behind his eyelids, but he ignores it. _I’m not a victim_ , he thinks. If anyone here is a victim, it’s…

_My mother is dead._

It’s not a phrase that makes sense to him yet.

It’s not a phrase that he can accept as truth, and it never quite feels real, even as he watches them lower her coffin into the cold, hard New Gotham ground.

_My mother is dead._

It never makes sense.

Not even three years and seven bodies later, when he’ll have this same feeling again as he sits on broken glass and bleeding knuckles and tries to convince himself, over and over again, _this isn’t happening, not to me, not again._

-

**Anger**

-

The anger comes and goes, but is also always there, somehow. Under the surface, buried good and deep like all of his friends and family, only not really because the next thing you know some damn _lowlife criminal_ is trying to tell him what kind of man _his_ father was, and he sees red and blacks out, all at the same time.

The second the others pull him off of the guy all of the fight leaves him, like something brittle, swept away by the wind. He doesn’t give a shit about this guy. God, why’d he do that? This guy’s opinion doesn’t matter to him.

And yet.

Other times it festers in him. Like after Darla, after all those other victims that he couldn’t save. He goes to a new school where all everyone does is stare at him or ask him questions about the shooting or alienate him even further in their attempts to stay away and he’s just—so—damn— _angry._

Angry at Bruce, angry at his dad, angry at those mobsters, angry at his classmates, and, most of all, he’s angry at himself.

He finds a way to keep calm, which in his particular case just means finding a way to keep busy. He keeps himself from doing anything stupid again like yelling at his only ~~living~~ friends out of frustration or cracking his knuckles on some poor bastard’s cheekbones for the same reason. He withdraws, he shortens his sentences, his syllables, takes them from knives to bullets. He keeps his hurricanes to himself, as much as it makes him seem like an asshole to the others. _Tim, we just want to help you, why won’t you just open up?_

He doesn’t answer, even to himself, but the knowledge is there, right under the surface.

_Because, if I do, I’ll just end up killing you, too._

-

**Bargaining**

_

Somewhere along the way, he crosses a threshold. He’s never quite sure which funeral it was that pushed him from the default, rational mindset of _Of course this wasn’t my fault,_ to the place wherein every adjective was appended to an –er. _Harder, better, smarter, stronger_. The word enough is in there a lot, too, but never favorably.

This is Tim’s bargaining stage.

As if offering sacrifices to his ghosts and promises to his living in fell swoop, Tim Drake trades his health and his innocence away to assassins and fossils and test tubes full of Luthor-green fluid, the same color as kryptonite.

He bargains with himself, with the dead, with God, even, to no avail. So instead he ensures he has something to bargain _with_.

Countless hours locked away in a lab with no sleep or food or breaks— _the dead don’t get any of that either, Tim_ —failed cloning after failed cloning. He wonders sometimes, if he had been successful, would the horror on Cassie’s face have been worth the chance to look at Conner’s again.

He keeps working.

And the cycle repeats with Bruce as well.

Tim buries his inhibitions, many of his morals, and the better part of his life expectancy, while he’s at it, in a shallow grave of his own invention, and sets off to find Bruce.

 _Bargaining_ doesn’t get much more poetic than making deals with demons like Ra’s al Ghul and his assassins. He traded his family’s trust in him and his complete trust in himself, for just a chance, just a possibility. A broken picture frame and a pair of eyes Tim is _sure_ he’d know anywhere.

But he won that bargain, didn’t he?

And he even got to keep his soul.

-

**Depression**

**-**

If the anger is like a hurricane, then depression is like a flood. Or, more accurately, the aftermath of one. After his dad died, Tim had felt like someone had punched him straight to the ocean floor, and the pressure was so great and his surroundings so dark, he just didn’t even bother trying to swim back to the surface. He wasn’t even sure there _was_ a surface waiting for him, sometimes.

When people try to talk to him, to help, most of the time it’s like their voices are coming through water to at him. He becomes something of an animatron: go to school, go to Wayne Manor, patrol, hire a fake uncle, sleep and eat somewhere if he can find it in himself, rinse, wash, repeat.

Bruce tries his best to help. He really does understand, and Tim knows he does, but in all honesty, he feels like he’s just one step closer to a future he never signed up for. He doesn’t want to be Batman. He doesn’t want to be Bruce. And yet they just keep getting more and more similar to each other.

Tim was kind of a know-it-all before he became Bruce’s protégé, but now with Robin training under his belt, he’s even more full of seemingly useless information. For example, water weighs approximately eight pounds per gallon. A fully-filled bathtub weighs somewhere close to half a ton.

He has to put Dana away.

He wonders how much an ocean must weigh, to drown him so thoroughly.

He can’t bring himself to care about the answer.

-

**Acceptance**

**-**

Acceptance is radical, and comes and goes long the wearing away of rocks by the tide. For Tim, acceptance means accepting that they are gone, and whether or not he is responsible, it happened. Accepting that he _could_ bring them back, but that it wouldn’t be them. Abandoning his hope of seeing them again and his burden of carrying their deaths around with him in one. He gets better. He starts hanging out with Ives and Zoe a little bit more, starts, if not actively talking to people, then at least not pushing them away.

He doesn’t realize how much he’s accepted about his situation until he’s sitting on a rooftop with a potential suicide victim, trying to explain it all. Accepting means admitting. Admitting that it was hard, and that he was weak. Accepting that maybe that was okay.

Accepting means calling Dick afterwards, to remind him that he is not an island.

And when his life gets tossed up yet again, and some people come back, some people were never really gone, and some stay dead, well. Accepting means adapting.

And when Bruce is found, all of his fears and insecurities are validated, are soothed away by a chorus of _I was right, I was always right._ When he realizes he’s weathered most of this journey on his own, because he was strong enough to do it, no matter what anyone else said.

Accepting means transcending.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> find more at my batman sideblog, thedorkwonder.tumblr.com!


End file.
